Sunrise on the Quiraing [#39]

Last night I did something incredibly simple which I have been terrified of doing for four months: I uploaded a photograph I took during our time on Skye.

It was a big deal, to me, for two reasons. First of all, I decided during our Islands & Highlands trip that I wanted to make more of my photography. Uploading to Flickr is a very slow process for me, which is why after a year and a half there are only three albums available. A large part of that is the desire to upload albums, not photographs; to tell a story in a single swoop, rather than drip-feed snippets shot by shot. It’s the main reason I like Flickr and it’s what the service is great at doing, but it means that very little content ever gets uploaded. The plan, then, was to repurpose/divide my Instagram account to utilise it for more than a running log of the beer I’ve tried, as well as reviving my old 500px account. On paper, that sounds pretty easy, but that meant starting new accounts, which has the knock-on effect of forcing me to pick the first photograph that was ever going to be uploaded to them. That was big deal number one, largely because I tend to overthink these things, but mainly because I like my projects to hit the ground running.

The second reason was those great artistic demons: imposter syndrome and rejection. I hadn’t even uploaded a photo but, somehow, doing so on a platform like 500px or Instagram feels much more loaded than Facebook, Flickr or even DeviantArt. Full time photographers, of course, use all of those platforms, but somehow I feel some of them are used to share their work whilst 500px and Instagram are used to curate it. That transforms those websites into portfolios, which sounds serious, even ‘professional’. But I definitely don’t see myself as a ‘professional’ photographer, so what right did I have to use those services? Worse still, what if I used them and was found out. I can deal with insignificance, to be lost beneath the ever heightening waves of content and uploads. My website gets an average of zero hits a week, but that doesn’t make me stop writing; my deviations would frequently go unnoticed, but I still fired up Photoshop. No, the problem is when you are noticed, but no one has anything nice to say. What if it turns out I have no photographic skill at all? What if I’m just copying other photographers*? What if I’m so bad that I get shared for the wrong reasons? Any chance of progressing my hobby, building a following, maybe even making a small amount of money, would all be dead in the water. Better to never try than to fail, right?

Well, obviously those were both terrible reasons for simply doing nothing and the result was just procrastination, plain and simple. At first I was “finding the right photograph”, but if I’m honest I knew which shot I should use within four days of the being in the Hebrides. Waking up on the Quiraing to that sunrise meant I would have to screw up pretty spectacularly to not have a great photograph. So, instead, the focus switched to “I need to set up the accounts” (achieved in June), then to “I need to edit it perfectly” (achieved in August, if not earlier), then to the simple “I need the time”. Ultimately, what it really boiled down to was “I need the courage”.

So last night I exported the file from Lightroom, found my old account logins and uploaded the shot. I never really found that courage, though. The reality is that not uploading was beginning to feel like more of a weight then the fear was. Still, the photograph was out there, despite some mild road-bumps. I have a real love-hate relationship with Instagram and I’m not particularly convinced that the wait was worthwhile here, but that’s a story for another post. The flipside is that I am incredibly happy with how the photo looks on 500px and the response it has received. My wildest dreams of instant, viral success (hah!) haven’t come true but over 50 people have liked the photo, it momentarily hit the “Popular” page and I’ve even been added to a couple of galleries, within whose company I feel incredibly out-of-my-depth. Instagram hasn’t been as positive, neither has Facebook, but neither have been negative in the slightest. Above all else, though, I’ve finally breached the levy of fear that has been holding me back. It’s a very real weight off my shoulders, ridiculous though that may be, and I feel genuinely elated at the new-found freedom. Hopefully it’s just the first in an on-going series – though when have I said that before…

* By which I don’t mean “inspiration”. Obviously, you photograph a range of mountains the chances are good someone else did so before you, probably even from the exact same spot. I mean more being accused of genuine copyright theft, something which would gut any sense of achievement I’ve felt to date.